Friday, November 06, 2020

Red, Blue, Green & Yellow Towns

Today's #30DayMapChallenge is to use the color red in a map. Yesterday the challenge was to use the color blue. Tomorrow the challenge is to use green and the day after it is to use yellow. I've decided to cheat by creating just one map for all four days. My Red Towns interactive map shows all the towns and cities in the USA with the colors red, blue, green or yellow in their names.

My map isn't very interesting. However it is a neat example of the power of importing and styling your own data in Mapbox Studio. This ability to add and style your own place-name labels in Mapbox Studio was used very effectively last year in The Pudding's A People Map of the USA.

To get the data for my map I ran searches in Overpass Turbo for towns and cities including the letters 'red', 'blue', 'green' or 'yellow'. I then downloaded the results as a GeoJSON file and uploaded it to Mapbox Studio to create a new data tileset. I then added this tileset to a new Mapbox map style. In Mapbox Studio I turned off all the other place-name labels and styled my new tileset so that all my place-name labels are colored to reflect the color in the name of the town or city.

As you can see from the map Green is the most popular color used in U.S. place-names. Red is the next most popular color and then blue. My search for yellow towns and cities returned just one result, the town of West Yellowstone.

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